All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (21 page)

He closed up the coffin then and went back to the middle car and picked out a seat for himself, raising a shade partway so he could look out if he had a mind to. He took an apple from his bindle, began to peel it with the jackknife. The apple turned out to be bitter, but he ate it anyway, chewing slowly because of bad teeth. After a while he was forced to sing to his anger. He sang a couple of Carter family standards in a half-aloud voice that couldn't have been heard half the car length away: "Little Darlin' Pal of Mine" and "Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes." He sang that last one especially for her, with true regret evident in every word. Meanwhile anger kept snapping the big blade of the jackknife into the handle, thumbing it out, snapping it back. Gradually his throat turned to stone, and his songs were just a whisper.

Anger won finally. It always did.

T
he rocketing train brought Jackson back to consciousness by gently but repeatedly banging his head against a leg of the dining table in the private car. The headache he woke up with was out of proportion to the amount of punishment he was absorbing from the table leg. His eyes wouldn't focus. He felt as bad as if he'd been on a prolonged ether drunk. Rolling over was an effort, but it was slightly better lying on his stomach with his fingers hooked into the carpet; he didn't feel so much at the mercy of the careening momentum of the train.

For half a minute, before he started retching, he had the chance to think about where he might be going and what he was doing on the train. But he was disoriented and confused by a large body of guilt that shared his skin, guilt that could not be resolved into specific accusations. So he'd done badly again. Taken the wrong way out. If only the goddam train would stop for a minute, two minutes—didn't they know how sick he was?

While he was throwing up, the pain in his head was excruciating, causing a free flow of tears. Then as he lay helpless, cold and nearly syncopic, the pain diminished. Guilt also edged away and he was touched, as if from a distance, by fear. Someone else's fear.

It had a galvanic effect on Jackson. He was able to sit up and then to stand, leaning on a chair. The sofa on which Champ Bradwin had been sleeping was empty; Champ was gone.

Cutlery and glassware rattled on the table. Jackson wet his dry mouth with water from a carafe and sniffed the scotch he'd been drinking for a clue as to what might have knocked him out. The whiskey smelled okay, but he wasn't about to taste it again.

Physically he'd begun to improve, his vision sharpening, his heart settling down, he could move and maintain his balance. With damask napkins he cleaned up after himself and threw whiskey on the carpet stains to disguise the smell. But now that his senses were more acute, he was aware of another odor in the air, raw and foul, like that of an unclean human body.

Jackson wondered if Champ's sherry had been doctored. If so, he wouldn't be up and around, because he'd drained his glass. Which prompted an interesting speculation: Why had he been drugged, and not Champ? Perhaps because Champ alone knew what Jackson would be drinking, and only Champ had had the opportunity to doctor the carafe behind his back.

Now all he had to do was think of some plausible reason why Champ would want to knock him out. Or he could just forget the whole thing, pull the emergency cord and get off the train before he suffered a worse fate than a headache and an upset stomach.

No reason for him to be worried about the missing Champ. But he was.

The crystal of his Marks and Spencer watch had been cracked, but the expensive timepiece was still ticking; it was now almost one in the morning, so he'd been unconscious for three and a half hours. During this time someone might have entered the car, walking over him like a carcass, a dog in the road, to take Champ away.

Jackson raised a window shade and looked out at the land, the stars, a tin-roof town cheaply lit and playing out at high speed, along the track. The train swayed and curved outward in a way that made Jackson queasy all over again; he saw the glow from the firebox of the locomotive, with nothing in between but a string of dark cars carrying no passengers.

He began his search in the bedroom of the private car, just to make cure Champ hadn't wandered back there and passed out in the small bathroom. He also checked the door to the observation platform, but it was locked on the inside, and the lock was corroded from disuse.

It was possible, Jackson thought as he went forward, that Champ was no longer on the train, which could have stopped and started a dozen times while he was sleeping off the drugged whiskey. Nevertheless he felt compelled, by the unelaborated anxiety that had been with him since he woke up, to look through the rest of the train.

The chair car just ahead seemed as empty as he'd anticipated, but it was uncomfortably dark inside. Again he noticed in the stuffy air the taint of an unwashed body, so strong the proprietor might have passed that way only a few minutes ago. A seedy trainman, perhaps—or a hobo enjoying unaccustomed luxury.

Jackson reached across a seat to raise a shade and provide more light in the coach, but he quickly reconsidered. An ordinary bum, nosing around the private car, would have found it impossible to resist the free booze. So either he was lying unconscious in one of the three cars, or—the man, despite his wretched body odor, was no ordinary bum. In which case, Jackson thought, he might be traveling in greater hazard than he'd imagined. But if he was going to continue there was no way to proceed from one car to the next without calling attention to himself, he'd just have to risk it. By now he was convinced—a new twist to the old anxiety—that Champ Bradwin was aboard, and in desperate need of him.

The middle car. Jackson, yearning for light, unbalanced by the headlong sway of the train, stepped on something slippery in the aisle and tumbled backward into a seat, icy with alarm, hands up to protect himself from whatever might come flying out of the dark at him. But again he was alone; the vivid terror quickly vanished. He scraped at the sole of his shoe with his fingers. Apple pulp and seeds, fresh juice. There were peelings in the seat where he was sprawled, and the air all around was much too familiar, rancid as a flophouse.

Jackson scowled and sat up, struggling against the momentum of the train, hearing a long whistle as the lights of another town pierced the worn-out shades of the chair car. He'd wrenched his neck in falling, and it was painful. Light flickered on the back of his hand as he reached up to massage the stiffened muscle.

He turned then and he saw that the shade covering the window had been slit by a sharp knife; many times, to achieve a complex design. The headlights of a stopped auto struck the shade at an upward angle, revealing a coiled serpent. The fabric of the eyes glowed, a virulent yellow: his imagination prompted the serpent to weave and hypnotize.

He bolted just in time, and was midway through the first car before his lungs unlocked and he could draw a breath.

Only the baggage car lay ahead. Jackson hesitated, but going on was better than going back, past the emblematic serpent, mistress of his disordered life.

The windowless door to the baggage car seemed to be locked, but the handle responded freely when he tugged at it. He put his full weight against the door. Then the baggage car lurched and the door popped open. Jackson fell inside just as the bum he'd been seeking was about to throw Champ Bradwin off the train.

Or so it looked to Jackson, but he had no time to sort out his impressions. The side door of the baggage car was open; the train was rushing across a long trestle; both men were dangerously near the door, locked together and struggling. Above the clatter of the train Jackson heard Champ scream.

He moved toward them, but was distracted by the sight of a dark-haired young woman in a satin-lined coffin—and by the coffin itself, which moved to the sway and roll of the train as if it were on casters.

Early Boy, wearing a cap that hid half his face had Champ in a forearm vise and was choking him, forcing him down on one knee. Champ's own grip had loosened, and now a hard shove could send him bouncing along the trestle track and into the dark slough below.

Jackson caught Early Boy by the collar of his shirt and hammered him in the kidneys. Early Boy jolted loose from Champ, turned in surprise and pain.

"Not me, doc," he gasped, but Jackson hit him a second time, and Early Boy doubled up on the floor of the baggage car. His cap fell off. Jackson, momentarily paralyzed by surprise, stared at him. When he turned his attention back to Champ he saw Champ at the doorway on his hands and knees, so close to falling out that the next hard sway of the train would throw him beneath the wheels.

Jackson reached him quickly, but he wasn't prepared for Champ's reaction. Champ fought desperately while Jackson dragged him back toward the middle of the car. Jackson bumped into the coffin and Champ tore himself free, made a lunge for the moonlit doorway—there was no doubt he intended to jump, but Jackson grabbed him again. Both men banged hard against the wall next to the door. As they struggled, Jackson had a close look at Champ's eyes. He appeared to be demented by grief.

"What are you trying to do?" Jackson shouted.

The tram bent into a long curve. The coffin immediately slid another two feet, to the edge of the doorway. Champ looked around in horror. Early Boy was getting up, reaching back to a hip pocket, his eyes gravely fixed on Champ. Both Champ and Jackson tried to get hold of the coffin to keep it from falling off the train.

Early Boy took one step and sapped Champ rather delicately behind the left ear.

Champ collapsed to the baggage-car floor as the heavy coffin, with Jackson still clinging helplessly to it, dipped out the door and tilted slowly toward the vertical. Jackson found himself being crushed between coffin and doorframe. The still-attractive face of the dead young woman rose toward his own like a cameo in a jeweler's revolving display case, her dark hair beginning to tangle in the rush of smoky air outside. Then the train lurched and ground its wheels around the curve and he was spared the final bone-breaking weight of the coffin as it slipped away and fell from the train.

Jackson, breathless and stunned, dropped to one knee and saw the coffin strike the ground end-first midway down a steep embankment. The lower lid opened on impact and the woman, dressed in white, seemed to step lightly from her satin couch, turn in the air, raise her hands in a theatrical gesture of departure and disappear abruptly as a dark fence of trees came between her and the train. Jackson closed his eyes, cramped by nausea. He couldn't open them again until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He looked around at the face of Early Boy Hodges. "Give me a hand with him," Early Boy said curtly.

"The coffin—we must stop the train and recover the body!"

"She was dead when she fell off; what difference does it make to her? Come on."

Early Boy reached behind Jackson and pushed the door shut. It was quieter in the baggage car as Jackson got to his feet. He was so light-headed he couldn't stand without holding on to the handrail beside the door.

"What are you doing on this train?" he said.

"Going south."

"I heard you were dead."

Early Boy smiled derisively, the smile happening only on the left side of his face, pulling his mouth askew as if a fishhook were caught in the corner. A gunshot wound, untreated for too long years ago, had paralyzed several of his facial muscles. Early Boy glanced at Champ, then stooped to take hold of the unconscious man.

"I can carry him," he said to Jackson. "You lead the way."

"Why did you hit him, Early Boy?"

"You saw yourself. He tried to jump. Would've broke his neck, or worse. I just did get hold of him when you come along." He smiled again. "Looked to me like you was good for a couple hours more shut-eye back there. What's the matter, doc, can't hold your liquor anymore?" He tested Champ's weight, grunted, changed his stance and grip and lifted him without too much effort, using the fireman's carry. Champ groaned and breathed through his mouth. Jackson wasn't too concerned about the effects of the blow he'd received; he had respect for Early Boy's technique with any kind of blunt instrument. But he didn't move out of Early Boy's way.

"Why was Champ trying to kill himself?"

"The way I get it, that woman in the coffin was his wife."

"Oh, for God's sake, I don't believe it!"

"Ask him yourself. If he makes any kind of sense when he comes around. Enough to drive a man crazy, what he just been through."

"He may have suffered worse than that these past few months."

"That a fact? Why don't you tell me about it, doc? But not here. He's getting heavy, and my back hurts."

Jackson anticipated that Champ would come around by the time they reached the private car, but he was still unconscious when the sweating Early Boy lowered him to the sofa. Jackson first examined Champ's eyes with a penlight and found that the pupils reacted normally. There was no lump where he'd been struck. Jackson proceeded to carefully monitor Champ's pulse, heart and lungs.

"He's asleep, that's all," Early Boy said, sounding churlish. "You know me better than that, doc."

"The major has pneumonia." But Jackson had reached the same conclusion: Champ wasn't doing badly and probably wouldn't have more than a sore spot on the back of his skull and a mild headache when he awakened.